I find myself sharing more and more short form these days (Facebook and Twitter) so I thought i’d try an experiment this week. Here is a wrap-up of all that i’ve shared on Twitter. If this is interesting (e.g., people share/comment) i’ll keep doing it.

I’m a huge fan of Klout; More than anyone in the space they have the momentum and the technology to create long term value for their users as as well as marketers interested in targeting them. But, they have a problem…or, better stated, an opportunity. As elegant and special of an introduction experience as that they create… fulfillment, through their partners, leaves something to be be desired. Here is an example:

I was introduced to the offer; and intrigued enough to go find out more:

At this point I was interested and called out to Facebook & Twitter to which I was literally showered in responses. Evidently, the show is very well liked. I was excited to get the DVD and check it out and flattered to have been offered the Klout Perk.

Last night I received a package that my wife rather sheepishly dropped to me (sheepishly as in, she thought i’d ordered something I shouldn’t have…).

The package: It was dirty. And I don’t just mean some scuffs, it was insanely filthy.

The Note: When you send something to ‘an influencer’ at least tell them who it’s from

If i’m Klout i’d start asking my fulfillment partners to work on the details. Even better, start to take ownership of some of your premier partner’s fulfillment. The details matter and matching the un-boxing – to the front end experience – to the fulfillment will delight your customers.

First thing i’d do? Create a handwritten note from Joe for every Klout Perks customer and give them to your fulfillment partners to deliver with the goods. Same thing for digital products too. Send me an email (from Klout & the Fulfillment Partner) explaining why I got it and what the experience is intended to do for me.

[fblikesend like=”on” send=”on” verb=”recommend” faces=”no”]
I read an inspirational article this weekend in Fast Company and wanted to share a wonderful metaphor that it highlighted as we all struggle with the day-to-day of keeping up with the infinite number of tasks piling on. Before that some context…In the article, David Allen, a self-proclaimed influential thinker on personal productivity, calls the infinite number of things we all have to get done the “silent trauma” of knowledge workers everywhere. I tend to agree as i, as he states in his article, operate in world where there really are “no edges to [my] job” and with Facebook, Google, Twitter and more there is “no limit to the potential information that can help [me] do [my] job better.”

Allen puts it succinctly “What’s more, in a competitive environment that’s continually being reshaped by the Web, we’re tempted to rebalance our work on a monthly, weekly, even hourly basis. Unchecked, warns Allen, this frantic approach is a recipe for dissatisfaction and despair — all-too-common emotions these days for far too many of us”

The hi-light of the article to me is the forming question that can help settle many of our personal strifes driving these emotions of dissatisfaction and dispair:

Allen Writes:

That leads to a simple question that most of us find difficult to answer: How should we go about setting priorities?

When people ask me how to set priorities, I ask them a question: At what level do you want to have this conversation? Each of us operates on many different levels at all times. We each have a runway that holds all of the little things that consume our time. At 10,000 feet are the projects. At 20,000 feet, people are deciding on their roles and goals. At 30,000 feet, people are thinking ahead, asking themselves where they want to be in their careers 12 to 18 months down the road. At 40,000 feet, they’re thinking 3 to 5 years out and looking at their organizational aspirations. Then, at the top — at 50,000 feet — they’re asking, “What’s my job on this planet?”

The punchline? Think hard about how to organize at different levels. This simple tactic of creating structure to how you prioritize and organize can be a life saver. You can read the full article here.

This week Rebecca, my wife and partner, was nominated as a Top 50 Mompreneurs of 2011. This is a fantastic recognition for all the hard work she’s put into building her business Petit Coutureand the notoriety it’s received. This award is special in that once a nomination is accepted a substantive portion of the final ranking is derived by voting amounts the Mompreneurs.

If you don’t know Rebecca, you’ll have to take my word for what an amazing business person, marketer, mother (of our 3 children), and partner she is. And get out the vote

You can vote by click on the image below and you don’t need to register to vote. Just find Rebecca Kaykas-Wolff and click the like button!

For many of us that blog this will sound familiar…I’ve just written my post and I think it’s going to resonate with my audience but it’s 11:00pm. I schedule my blog to auto publish at 9:00am the next day and to my twitter account to share quickly thereafter. The problem is that my guess is as good as yours as to whether if 9:00am is the best time for me to send out something I’ve written (or anything that I want to share and have people see for that matter). While a cobbled together set of analytics and tools ‘may’ have given me insight into what the best time is for my own publishing there is nothing automated about it.

In so many ways I’m just caught in the trap of being the social media middleware again. A few weeks ago I started to use Timely from the team at Flowtown. It has made quite an impression on me and way that I use twitter (and, anecdotally, through the sharing preference with Facebook, it made me much more efficient there as well).

If you are a curator or write an enormous amount of great content Timley does much of the heavy lifting for you. It analyzes the activity across your Twitter ID(s) and selects the chunks of time that you have the highest probability of being responded too. The Flowtown team has even exposed the most basic elements of their algorithm on Quora. Its simple to use and it works. How do I know?

I had a hunch after just a few days of using Timley, that my response rates had appeared to go up in both Twitter and Facebook posts. Take a look below:

Anecdotal is nice but the proof is in the proverbial pudding:

I’ve driven a substantive increase in my Klout score in addition to having a very respectable RT rate and reach.

Today Flowtown announced the official public launch of Timely which includes:

I found a copy of Razorfish’s Liminal last night (via twitter) and was struck by a couple of things. First off, the production value is amazing. It’s beautiful and has a very modern feel while maintaining an almost archival quality. Their design team deserves kudos.

Second, in their prologue, I really appreciated the honesty of their definiton of engagement.

“Engagement – Just the mention of it can spark a visceral response from marketers, partly because no one has pinpointed what it really means. Let’s get it out there: engagement is a messy, complicated idea – yet a critical one – because it gets to the heart of the relationship between customers and brands. We know that it is valuable, but the how, what and why of it is ambiguous as best”. – Razorfish Liminal 2011

Mike Axinn (on our team at Involver) recently did an interview with me to kick-off a series we are exploring agile with. Mike’s an amazing talent and put together this brief introduction that he released today. I’m sharing it on the marketing iteration blog however you can also find it on Invover’s blog as well.

I’ve been relatively silent on this blog for the past five months. Starting a new job, at a startup nonetheless, and moving states with a family of five has a way of slowing down the all non-essential aspects of one’s life. That all said, i’ll be posting more regularly now. The last five months have been eye opening and a breath of fresh air for me. At Involver we’ve built the fundamentals of our marketing infrastructure and are about to turn the corner to run the team in a full agile model. I’ll be writing about:

setting up a marketing infrastructure in a startup
going from 0 to 100 miles an hour (creating repeatable programs in a startup)
nurturing in a startup
product & brand relationship early in the development of your brand and products
and more…

And i’m kicking today off by sharing my perspective of the similarities between Social Marketing & B2B Marketing:

As many struggle to identify the ‘right’ models to engage in social channels i’m asserting that B2B and Social have more in common than most have ever thought. In B2B and in social it’s important to always remember that you are dealing with people and that you are maintaining relationships over time. I like this graphic by EngageSciences. It shows a simple model that emphasizes the importance of maintaining a relationship through multiple cycles sometimes being much more directed than others.

B2B marketing may not have the same popular culture cache as Social marketing however, as you’ll see from this collection of quotes (collected by Marketo) there is a distinct human element that clearly aligns the two. For fun, I changed B2B to social on a couple…I think it works. Do you?

B2B:

David Meerman Scott: It’s fascinating how the fundamentals of business-to-business marketing are the same today as they were 50 years ago. It’s still about relationships although today we have new tools and techniques at our disposal.

Amber Naslund: In the world of B2B, your professional network is everything. Because your business is about business, the potential of who you know and who they know is where powerful connections happen.

Seth Godin: The only way to consistently grow in B2B is to be better than very good.

Revised Social:

David Meerman Scott: It’s fascinating how the fundamentals of Social marketing are the same today as they were 50 years ago. It’s still about relationships although today we have new tools and techniques at our disposal.

Amber Naslund: In the world of Social marketing, your professional network is everything. Because your business is about business, the potential of who you know and who they know is where powerful connections happen.

Seth Godin: The only way to consistently grow in Social marketing is to be better than very good.